Focus!

I read Bishop Goodpaster’s blog today where he listed four areas of leadership, where when we are accomplished at them, we should be enabled to be a more missional church. They were:

• focus
• simplify
• collaborate
• adapt

Bishop gave us discipling questions to contemplate, and I got stumped with the first one. Focus. Over the last years, we pastors have been asked to consider ourselves to be more mission oriented and to lead our churches in this vain. We have been told to stop maintaining our current organizational structures and become more like missionaries working out of mission stations.

Here is a problem. For so many years we have been asked to “support” missions, missionaries, and mission work. Now we are being asked to be the missionaries. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that this is the right approach. It is just that it very difficult to change the mindset of the average church goer from supporter of to actual missionary.

The church has been completely instrumental in developing this mindset over the years. My question is how do we change the focus of church goers? Until we do get the focus changed, our efforts at being a missional church where we can simplify, collaborate and adapt will be seriously hampered.